Case Western Reserve Univ., Cleveland, OH. Inst. on the Family and the Bureaucratic Society.

This document includes the proposal and implementation of a study focusing on the family's expectations, orientations, and cultural practices with regard to the educational system and the system's expectations, orientations and practices concerning the child and his family. The basic problem in this exploratory study is to describe analytically the socialization system of families and schools in a community with substantial numbers of blacks and whites including Puerto Rican Americans point to congruity, ambiguity and difference in family and school socialization patterns and expectations; offer explanations of "why" these differences, indicating factors that influence their form and intensity; explore the impact of school-family experiences upon the socialization patterns of the family and describe techniques used by teachers and especially parents to handle and resolve such school-family discordancies and conflicts. The study population was obtained by including all potential black and Puerto Rican students in nine elementary schools in Lorain, Ohio, and randomly selected white students when needed. The final sample represented combinations of the following variables: cultural/racial group (black, Puerto Rican, white); class (working, middle), and family structure (intact--single or dual career, single parent). (Author/JM)